--- title: 'Will walk for food: exploring Singapore hawker centre density' author: Dmitry Shkolnik date: '2020-07-21' slug: will-walk-for-food-exploring-singapore-hawker-centre-density twitterImg: post/020-07-18-will-walk-for-food-exploring-singapore-hawker-centre-density_files/figure-html/hawker_grid_plot-1.png image: post/020-07-18-will-walk-for-food-exploring-singapore-hawker-centre-density_files/figure-html/hawker_grid_plot-1.png categories: - analysis - maps - spatial tags: - singapore - mapbox - r - mapdeck ---
With the current situation in the world being what it is and any chance of entering and leaving Singapore seems off the table for foreseeable future, since our lockdown was lifted last month I’ve been playing catchup on exploring Singapore in greater detail. While exploring all the famous hawker centres was one of the first things I dove into when I first moved to Singapore last year, my busy work and travel schedule put it on the backburner for a while. Now more time to explore local neighbourhoods has meant more time to eat. So I wanted to see how many possible hawker centres were within my vicinity and to test out some new R packages I had been meaning to try.
This interactive map shows how many hawker centres and hawker centre stalls there are within a 30 minute walk of any point in Singapore. The map is rendered in deck.gl using the mapdeck R package. Data for walking isochrones comes from mapbox and generated for each hawker centre using the brand new mapboxapi package. Spatial indexing is done using the geohashTools package. All code including this page is written in R and is documented step-by-step at the bottom of the page (scroll on, if interested.)
A few caveats: people seldom walk 30 minutes to get anywhere in Singapore – it’s too hot. Also, the data here is based on the data for government run hawker centres using data from data.gov.sg. While extensive - there are 114 hawker centres comprising around 6400 individual food stalls, this does not include the countless stalls and kopitiams (“coffee shops”) scattered around the island under residential housing blocks and commercial towers. The actual count of hawkers and hawker-like stalls in the country must be close to 10,000 – if not more.
The map below is interactive, zoomable, and provides detail for each location on mouseover.